A new Facebook prototype AI can watch and describe what’s happening in videos

Reuters/Dado Ruvic Facebook has been ramping up its use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the past few years: improving newsfeeds, unveiling their own personal digital assistant, and using automatic tagging on photos.

Now Facebook is working on programs than can "watch" videos and classify and tag them.

Rob Fergus, head of the computer vision team at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), told Popular Science they are creating what's basically image recognition for video.

Popular Science reported that lot of video being posted on Facebook now is lost in the shuffle because they lack the descriptive text that accompanies images, called metadata. The new AI they are developing would be able to "watch" a video and describe what's happening in it.

They're testing early versions of it now and published a paper about their research on the FAIR website. Below is a video of Facebook's AI system watching and tagging short scenes of people playing sports below.

Here's another video of Facebook's prototype AI, including it deciding if a scene is people playing baseball or softball.

Popular Science reports that this program would do a lot to curb users from uploading offensive videos like porn, or stealing a copyrighted video and uploading it as their own. They also hope that it would help track viral news events and be able to identify different kinds of video genres — like sports or animals.

AI watching a video and recognizing what's happening in it is still a pretty major feat, at least for social media networks. It could make finding similar videos on Facebook and Instagram easier, especially for those days when you just need to watch a lot of cute animal videos.